THE CAMELS BREAK DOWN 539 
bird was singing in the tree-top — singing a song of mystic 
meaning which I did not understand. A beautiful dream ! 
How gladly would I have continued to steep my soul in its 
false illusions ! But alas ! alas ! the hollow clang of the 
funereal bells again woke me up to the grim realities of that 
evil desert. I sat up. My head was heavy as lead ; my 
eyes were blinded by the glittering reflections of the eternal 
yellow sand. 
Up staggered the camels, their eyes dull and lustreless, 
like the dying gleams of the setting sun. It was a look of 
resignation, a look of indifference ; all desire for food had 
gone out of it. Their breathing was laboured and slow ; 
their breath more disagreeable than usual. There were 
only six of them, led by Islam Bai and Kasim. The other 
two men had remained behind with Babai and Chong-kara. 
Even at the beginning of the day Chong-kara’s legs had 
failed him. “ They would come on to camp,” said Islam, 
“as quickly as they were able.” 
After that the desert showed us another of its features. 
Every now and again we stumbled into level pools of 
inconceivably fine dust, lying embedded between the dunes. 
We sank into them up to the knees, as though we trod 
on soft mud. Accordingly, after that we kept a vigilant 
look-out for these treacherous spots. In other places the 
sand was covered with a thin sprinkling of minute particles 
of flints with sharp edges. They appeared to exercise 
much the same sort of influence upon the sand-dunes that 
oil does upon the waves of the sea. Where they were 
present, the dunes were flattened down, rounded off, and 
lost their delicate rippled surface. 
Between two of the sand-dunes we made a strangely 
unexpected discovery, namely a portion of the skeleton 
of a donkey, or, as the men asserted, of a wild horse. 
There was nothing but the leg bones, which were white 
as chalk, and so brittle that a mere touch caused them to 
crumble to pieces like ashes. The best-preserved parts 
were the hoofs. They were too large to be those of a 
donkey, too small to have belonged to a tame horse. 
What was the creature doing out here in the desert ? 
